Hiring Continues At Brand-rex

Specialty Cable Maker Adding 125 Jobs At Willimantic Plant

The storied BICC Brand-Rex specialty cable plant in Willimantic is beefing up its employment in a year when the company closed a sister factory in Pennsylvania and the market for cables is strong.

Brand-Rex began the year with about 400 employees in Willimantic, and now has more than 500, said Kevin Toomey, director of human resources. In all, the company will add at least 125 jobs this year, including 100 hourly and 25 salaried, Toomey said.

The bulk of the new hiring began early in the year, when Brand-Rex closed a plant in York, Pa., that employed 140 people.

Toomey said most of the new Willimantic jobs are the result of the consolidation, but strong sales could mean even more jobs.

``The biggest problem we have right now is we're working a lot of overtime,'' Toomey said. ``We will look at our needs fairly quickly. . . . I could see us continuing in a hiring kind of mode through the balance of this year.''

The good news at Brand-Rex is part of a slow, inconsistent remaking of general manufacturing around the state. In addition to adding people, Brand-Rex transferred $10 million in machinery from Pennsylvania, built a new high-speed line for plastic cable jacketing, upgraded computer systems and spent $3.5 million on other improvements.

Brand-Rex is a unit of London- based BICC Group plc, a $7.5 billion-a-year cable, engineering and construction firm with 61 cable plants worldwide. Brand- Rex is the division that makes the most highly specialized cables, with as many as 30,000 product designs.

The 670,000-square-foot Willimantic plant was originally built during World War II by Pratt & Whitney as a virtually bombproof copper cable factory. As recently as 1982, there were 1,000 production workers at the plant.

BICC bought the old Brintec Corp., then the Brand-Rex parent, in 1989, and later conducted a series of layoffs, leading to a low of slightly fewer than 400 people last year. In the recent rehiring, the company recalled all of the laid-off former employees who still wanted to come back.

Hourly employees, now numbering about 360, are represented by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.

Toomey said the decision to close the Pennsylvania plant was very difficult ``because of the human side of it.'' As for the Willimantic factory, he said, ``This plant is more functional and versatile.''